The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Search engines assist users in retrieving relevant data from data sources. The data source herein may refer to data and/or document(s) on the Internet, intranet, storage devices, and so on. In order to use a search engine, a user seeking information on a desired topic generally inputs a search query relevant to the topic into the search interface of the search engine. Generally a search query may comprise keyword(s) or phrase(s), visual element(s) and combination thereof. Once the search query is received, the search engine identifies documents in a data source that are relevant to the search query and displays a report with a prioritized list of links pointing to relevant documents containing the search keywords.
Known search engines like Google®, Bing®, Yahoo®, etc. have provided a variety of functionalities to improve the user experience and speedup the search process. One such functionality is providing for search query suggestions on the search results page or as the user incrementally types in the search query in the input box of a search interface. These search query suggestions may be available as a list or drop down list and the user may select one of the search query suggestions to initiate the search. The user can also ignore the search query suggestions and continue to input the search query. While these search query suggestions are very useful to the users, there is a need to provide additional improvements that can further not only speedup the search but also improve the quality of the results.